CobraA1

Reply to Win 7 UAC is driving me crazy in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

[quote] All due respect Cobra and although the setttings may ring true in some cases, Win 7 is hardly a nuclear power plant. [/quote] You're right, the systems he maintains are likely to be vastly more secure than any desktop OS in existence. He still warns vehemently about being arrogant and downgrading your security. [quote] Most people can use simple common sense to protect themselves from anything that UAC would ever help them with [/quote]<

Reply to Win 7 UAC is driving me crazy in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

I do not recommend turning UAC completely off: There are benefits beyond that dialog box that you may not notice, but may prevent you from getting stung. There is a workaround in Vista, and I'm sure it applies to 7 as well: Use the the task scheduler. Interestingly enough, the task scheduler starts as an elevated process and has the ability to create new elevated processes without prompts. Just add a task in there to load your programs with admin privileges at startup.

Reply to Fences disables Active Desktop (Embedded Webpages)? in Object Desktop Stardock Forums

If you ever upgrade to Vista or Windows 7, they have a photo gadget as one of the defaults :).

Reply to Microsoft Security Essentials in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

Other AV solutions have been driving me crazy with false positives and bogging down computers. Especially AVG's "link scanner" stuff, which frankly I had to turn off to make the Internet bearable. When it expires, I'm likely not to renew and just use this.

Reply to DeskScapes 3 New User Interface in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

The only complaint I have about the new interfaces (I've seen this in WB7) - the size of the scrollbar. So far, it's been too thin.

Reply to What's the best gaming laptop? in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

I'll go ahead and recommend the Alienware M15x Laptop .

Reply to What will the desktop of the future look like? in OS Customization Stardock Forums

While 3D has a big "coolness" factor attached - I haven't really seen very many examples of them actually being useful in a way meaningful to most people. BumpTop is a nice attempt to do so - but turns out it's only useful for a single task: Sorting documents. And even then, once the coolness wears off, I'm not entirely sure it's more efficient than a file manager. I've actually had BumpTop for a while. But I use it so infrequently - honestly, I'm thinking about uninstalling it. For o

Reply to What would you like to be skinnable in WindowBlinds that is not currently? in WindowBlinds WinCustomize Forums

How about this? When you tell WB to apply a different skin to an app, that app also gets the skin's colors. Or, if you make an exception for an app, that app gets the default colors instead of the skin colors.

Reply to Tough love for desktop enhancements is needed in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

In case anybody is wondering - there is an option in Windows 7 to change the icon size, which changes the bar size . . . [quote]Have you tried a vertical taskbar setup yet on W7?[/quote] As somebody who normally works with a horizontal bar, the icon-centric approach actually works well vertically. I never really liked vertical in other OSes. But I think I could handle vertical with Windows 7.

Reply to Tough love for desktop enhancements is needed in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

After playing around with WindowsBlinds a bit more (on my Vista system) - the transition between Windows themes and Stardock themes is still a bit rough. Sometimes Windows seems to forget about hardware acceleration and has difficulties getting Aero back. Also, the scroll bar at the bottom of the new WindowsBlinds UI - honestly, it's a bit thin.

Reply to Tough love for desktop enhancements is needed in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

According to the Windows 7 engineering blog , they're trying to put it all into video memory and accelerate common GDI operations - so yeah, GDI is (at least partially) hardware accelerated again.

Reply to Tough love for desktop enhancements is needed in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

Is it possible to use a single image for frame borders (or have SkinStudio split an image) instead of creating a separate image for each side?

Reply to Tough love for desktop enhancements is needed in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

Whoops, missed that. Been a while since I used SkinStudio.

Reply to Tough love for desktop enhancements is needed in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

Can I make a feature request for skinning in general? Right now, there's a lot of duplication of effort. Like arrows. Arrows appear in a lot of places, but sometimes I want to use the same arrow in more than one place. Well, with all of the different states a control can be in, I end up having to make different graphics for what is essentially the same thing. Or sometimes the different "states" of a control are nothing more than a color change. In those cases, maybe have an op

Reply to Tough love for desktop enhancements is needed in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

I think that most of XP still beimg popular is due to two reasons: Businesses, which are largely conservative and take their time upgrading. Vista's reputation, which is still pretty abysmal, even after Microsoft fixed the biggest issues in the service packs. It seems that in this day and age, a lot of people are so into "going with the flow" so to speak and not trying stuff themselves. They take the advice of other people at face value and ofte

Reply to Tough love for desktop enhancements is needed in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

[quote]A Linux Distribution like Ubuntu can be easier to use than Windows[/quote] I've heard that claim before - BUT: Microsoft and Apple pour some serious dollars into ease of use. They commit some serious research into it. Linux, for the most part, guesses what is "easy to use" and what's not. What I can't figure out is why Linux makes some pretty basic blunders when it comes to ease

Reply to Tough love for desktop enhancements is needed in Personal Computing Stardock Forums

We need to clone Frogboy so he can be two places at once ;). I'm pushing hard to try to get Win7 on all of my (and my parents') machines when it comes out. Student discounts, the family pack, etc - I'm pulling out all of the stops to grab it on budget and in a short period of time. IMHO it's worth it :). [quote]For all the grief we used to receive about how “open source” and “freeware” would rule the world[/quote] Heh. For all of the efforts to

Reply to Cool! in WindowBlinds Stardock Forums

mmk, I'll just wait for the next version or so, or maybe do the theme thing. I haven't played with SkinStudio for a while.

Reply to Cool! in WindowBlinds Stardock Forums

Is there a way to add new textures? It seems to be a drop target, but it's not adding the images as textures when I drag and drop them.

Cool! in WindowBlinds Stardock Forums

So . . . I was playing around with the new Chrome and its texture based themes, and thinking to myself, "wouldn't it be cool if all my apps did this?" Then I downloaded the new beta for WindowsBlinds! Textures in everything! Stardock - you've done it again - you've stolen my heart [e digicons] Now - can I have it back, please? [e digicons]:grin:[/e]

Reply to I cannot believe I am typing this. in IconPackager Stardock Forums

[quote] CobraA1 I would say that indeed something on your computer was not playing well with other programs/software.[/quote] Indeed. It appears either a driver or the software themselves weren't playing well with whatever IP was doing. [quote]When you were uninstalling programs did you run a

Reply to I cannot believe I am typing this. in IconPackager Stardock Forums

Humm, I disabled their recovery stuff, but there's an "int15.sys" that is part of something to do with that, which I haven't disabled. Don't wanna touch it, as I have no idea what it does. Yet another reason for me to switch to Windows 7 . . .

Reply to I cannot believe I am typing this. in IconPackager Stardock Forums

Windows XP, 32 bit on an Acer Aspire One. And I have no idea the version - Impulse showed both 4 and 5 installed. I didn't write down the exact version number, I just uninstalled.

I cannot believe I am typing this. in IconPackager Stardock Forums

I cannot believe I have to type this. I absolutely cannot use Icon Packager anymore. Stardock has made some great programs - but Icon Packager renders my computer absolutely unusable. It all started with Google's update software. It stopped working at one time, and had stopped working for several days. I absolutely could not figure it out. It was driving me crazy - there seemed to be mothing wrong with anything, but no matter what I did, no matter what caches I cleared

Reply to 21 Reasons Why the World Hates America in Politics Stardock Forums

Question: Is there any way for an American to answer this and not: a) Be called an idiot in some form or fashion because you disagree with the list? or b ) Be called an idiot in some form or fashion because you agree with the list? Apparently, either I'm in denial or my country sucks. Either way, I guess the world hates me. Basically, this list is nothing but a logical fallacy known as "<a href="http://www.fallacyfiles.org/poiswell.htm